Laura A. Janda is a Professor of Russian Linguistics at the University of Tromsø, Norway. Her main research interests are Russian, Slavic languages, morphology and aspect. Since moving to Norway, she has begun working on North Saami and has several scholarly publications on that language as well.

She has taught many courses at different universities in the US and Norway, including Russian, Czech, Cognitive Linguistics, and Quantitative Methods in Linguistics.

Her most recent book publication is Why Russian aspectual prefixes aren’t empty: prefixes as verb classifiers (2013, co-authored with Anna Endresen, Julia Kuznetsova, Olga Lyashevskaya, Anastasia Makarova, Tore Nesset, Svetlana Sokolova). She has also edited a number of books, including Cognitive Linguistics: The Quantitative Turn. The Essential Reader (2013) and Slavic Linguistics in a Cognitive Framework (2011), and is Associate Editor of the journal Cognitive Linguistics. She is a past president of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association. In 2014 she helped to launch TROLLing, the Tromsø Repository Of Language And Linguistics, an international publicly accessible archive for the sharing of linguistic data and statistical analysis available at opendata.uit.no.

Currently Laura Janda is working on several projects, including the Russian Constructicon (a multinational project coordinated with the building of constructicons for other languages), and corpus- and experiment-based investigations of aspect in Russian.